The professional news page of Ernest W. Adams, author of The Designer's Notebook.

Monday, October 04, 2004

Panel and teaching at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola

Karlshamn, Sweden

I took a couple of days to go back to Karlshamn, on the south coast of Sweden, to teach about game design. I gave a lecture to a group of students, and also sat on a panel to talk about games to an extremely diverse group of people who were on a special course. I met a city planner, a professor of rhetoric, and a business development officer for a local district in Sweden -- who turned out to be a Lebanese Maronite Christian by birth. There was also a German filmmaker from the Frisian islands: tiny outcrops in the North Sea where they speak a dialect of German comprehensible only to themselves. We had some fascinating conversations over dinner and a few games of Battlefield 1942, which most of them had never seen before. We also enjoyed a wine-tasting competition, trying to identify four different Chiantis at varying levels of quality by their taste alone. I fared badly, I'm afraid, only correctly identifying two of the four. I assumed that the one with the harshest taste would also be the cheapest; as it happened, the cheapest was the one with the blandest taste.

I was able to get a few pictures as well, one of the school's new building, and a couple of the big brewery there both by day and by night. The brewery was drying its barley, and the aroma of toasting cereal grains -- a warm, agricultural scent -- pervaded the waterfront. The pictures were taken out my hotel room window, and they nicely show how the harbor comes right into the middle of town. But this is just a small inlet from a much larger road that leads out to the Baltic. At the mouth there's an island fortified in Renaissance times to protect the town, and one of these days I'd like to go have a look at the fortifications... if I ever get there in the summertime.

About Me

Dr. Ernest Adams is an independent game design consultant, writer, and teacher. He has been in the game industry since 1989, and is the author of Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design with Joris Dormans,Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition, andBreak Into the Game Industry: How to Get a Job Making Video Games. Ernest was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions on theDungeon Keeperseries, and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on theMadden NFL football product line. He is the founder of the International Game Developers' Association, and is a popular lecturer at the Game Developers' Conference and many other events.